…with lesbians?
That was the Eddie Murphy movie.
I only saw this online, as I don’t watch commercials anymore. I almost didn’t believe it was real.
Where did I see it? That guy who does the Plinkett reviews also made this video about the trailer. And don’t worry, he’s not in character (except as a short voiceover announcing the title), and you probably wouldn’t know it was him if I hadn’t told you. Heck, I bet some of you won’t know which of the two guys it is.
It’s the guy on the left
Some Zookeeper data:
I’ve seen an estimated budget of $80 million. So not all that cheap. Lot’s of CGI.
Currently 15% at RottenTomatoes, with 16% among top critics. (For which I blame Roger Ebert’s inexplicable positive review. The guy is starting to lose it.)
Earned an estimated $7.4 million opening Friday night, maybe make around $23 million this weekend. Will not come close to making it’s budget back domestically. Films like this don’t do so well overseas. (Action films like the Transformers crap do.) Family films with good buzz tend to hold on at the box office but this one isn’t going to do that.
Zookeeper also seems to have a big advertising budget. But the TGIF type promotion probably helps that a lot.
I can see product placement bringing in maybe $5 million, possibly as much as $10 for a film like this. The good news is that the advertisers aren’t going to get nearly as good a return on their bucks as they thought. This makes me happy.
It’s gonna have to sell a lot of DVDs to parents hoping to shut their screaming brats up to have this one break even.
That’s a lot of awesome if read the right way.
“I can see product placement bringing in maybe $5 million.
(but) possibly as much as TEN DOLLARS for a film like this.”
I haven’t been in a TGIF’s in probably 15 years.
I saw the movie on Friday. I went into it fully aware of how bad the ratings on RottenTomatoes were, so I had low expectations, and as it turned out, I enjoyed it more than I expected to (not that that’s saying much). It’s not a bad movie per se, but it is very cliched and formulaic, and anyone who’s seen more than one or two movies in their life will probably know the way it’s going to turn out within the first ten minutes.
Oh, and the TGI Friday’s stuff that was such a big part of the trailer wasn’t that big a part of the movie.
Later, I noticed a can of Red Bull sitting around in Whatsername Blonde’s apartment, and I thought it was going to turn out that it had been her carelessly-discarded can that the lioness had choked on; but for some reason the movie didn’t go there.
This is another one of those movies that has been in the can for quite a while. It was filmed back in 2009 and was supposed to come out last October. They finally pushed it out to this past week. Not always a good sign when a studio is reluctant to release it.
Actually, there was an article in the L.A. Times recently that was saying that this might have been a rare case where, believe it or not, they delayed the release because they were so absolutely sure they had a huge summer hit on their hands. Apparently, the test screening results were through the roof (so much so that they wondered if they were a mistake and had them recalculated).
That was hilarious, thanks for linking (but I could totally tell).
When looking at the hideous trailers, I was actually wondering if Zookeeper was designed to do better internationally than most similar movies. It looks they went with “everyman hero doing cheap physical humor” which translates, and all the animal voices could be dubbed with whatever stereotypes the localization area finds funny.
No idea if that’s the reality.
Hello? Spoiler alert!!!
So what exactly would a bad movie “per se” look like? 
Kevin James and the monkey ordered the Loaded Potato Skins and Friday’s® Tostado Nachos.
Also, he was dead the whole time. The ape represented his issues with his father.
What about Career Opportunities, set pretty much entirely in Target? Terrible film, but Jennifer Connelly at her cinematic hottest.
I thought the ape *was *the zookeeper’s father.
:mad:
Now I’m not going to see it.
Maybe the mistake was holding the graph the wrong way up.
Looking a Kevin James’ movie track record, I am starting to wonder if his agent actually has something personal against him. Did he run over his agent’s dog or sleep with his daughter or something?
Saw the movie this weekend (we took the kiddies who wanted to see it):
Pretty much my impression as well. I went in with low expectations and it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t that good either. Parts of it were pretty painful, all of it was predictable, but the kids liked it. My wife spent the whole movie rolling her eyes.
There was plenty of product placement in this one. The TGIF thingy was pretty bad, but since I don’t feel like doing spoilers I won’t go into details. It was part of the story though and made a certain sense in the movie (it could have been any restaurant…TGIF probably just bid more).
The gorilla wasn’t dressed as a human…he went as himself PLAYING a human dressed as a gorilla. Since the animals can all speak English and simply choose not to due to some code, the gorilla could play a very convincing human dressed as a gorilla…or something.
Well, it’s not my favorite place, but it’s not that bad either. Sort of like this movie…if you go in with low expectations of a restaurant that’s just a chain selling chain type food then you won’t be disappointed. I do like their extra-large sized mudslides made with real vanilla ice cream, FWIW.
-XT